The Tyranny of the Administrative State

Government by unelected experts isn’t all that different from the ‘royal prerogative’ of 17th-century England, argues constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger.

By

John Tierney

June 9, 2017 Mr. Tierney is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal

New York

What’s the greatest threat to liberty in America? Liberals rail at Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and his hostility toward the press, while conservatives vow to reverse Barack Obama’s regulatory assault on religion, education and business. Philip Hamburger says both sides are thinking too small.

Like the blind men in the fable who try to describe an elephant by feeling different parts of its body, they’re not perceiving the whole problem:the enormous rogue beast known as the administrative state.

Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government, run by the president and the dozens of federal agencies that assume powers once claimed only by kings. In place of royal decrees, they issue rules and send out “guidance” letters like the one from an Education Department official in 2011 that stripped college students of due process when accused of sexual misconduct.

Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar and winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize last year for his scholarly 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

“Essentially, much of the Bill of Rights has been gutted,” he says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School. “The government can choose to proceed against you in a trial in court with constitutional processes, or it can use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law. Our fundamental procedural freedoms, which once were guarantees, have become mere options.” ​

In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. “Ultimately this is not about the politics of left or right. Unlawful government power should worry everybody.”

Forget What You Hear: Our Narcissist President Is Winning

I first became aware of Donald Trump in the late seventies. I was not impressed. In fact, I didn’t like him. I thought he was a braggart and a man who went out of his way to disrespect women. I wouldn’t have said so at the time, but he was clearly a narcissist.

Growing up in an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx, I have been around men like him all my life. They’re going to do this; they’re going to do that. They have this; they have that. I took him to be a person so full of himself that his company would be unbearable.

I didn’t give him much hope of winning the presidency, either, but as election day neared, friends would ask what I thought a Trump presidency would look like. Forced at that point to think about it, I would say that as a businessman, at least he would make quality appointments to the power positions in his administration – you can’t run a successful business without being able to delegate authority to a strong team of employees.

As far as Trump’s narcissism, I’m not sure that hurts him as a president. Sure, he could show better discretion with what he says – he does seem to have an almostPlaxico Burress-type dedication to shooting himself in the foot (see L’Affaire Comey). Yet I think you need to have a certain amount of narcissism to be a successful president, although it doesn’t guarantee success.

Just look at our second-most recent president, a solipsist so narcissistic he actually thought his mere presence would slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. Barry took narcissism to a new level, seemingly believing himself some kind of god, a belief fed by the nearly total hagiographic coverage he received from the Fourth Estate, our once nationally treasured free press, reduced to sycophantic (more like “sycofanatic”) exaltation of the “light bearer,” the man with the “crease.”

The difference between Barry’s narcissism and Trump’s is this: Trump is the guy who looks at the most beautiful girl at the party and says, “I can get her number.” Barry would look at the same girl and say, “She wants me.” Trump would then pursue the girl, and Barry would walk away, because obviously, she is not good enough for him, and besides, someone told him there’s a mirror in the next room.

Anatomy of a Deep State

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: In 2013 the EPA hired Francesca Grifo, longtime activist at the far-left Union of Concerned Scientists. Ms. Grifo had long complained that EPA scientists were “under siege”—according toa reportshe helped write—by Republican “political appointees” and “industry lobbyists” who had “manipulated” science on everything from “mercury pollution to groundwater contamination to climate science.”As Scientific Integrity Official, Ms. Grifo would have the awesome power to root out all these meddlesome science deniers. A 2013 Science magazine story reported she would lead an entire Scientific Integrity Committee, write an annual report documenting science “incidents” at the agency, and even “investigate” science problems—alongside no less than the agency’s inspector general.

And get this: “Her job is not a political appointment,” the Science article continues, “so it comes with civil service protections.” Here was a bureaucrat with the authority to define science and shut down those who disagreed, and she could not be easily fired, even under a new administration.

On May 8 a woman few Americans have heard of, working in a federal post that even fewer know exists, summoned a select group of 45 people to a June meeting in Washington. They were almost exclusively representatives of liberal activist groups. The invitation explained they were invited to develop “future plans for scientific integrity” at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Meet the deep state. That’s what conservatives call it now, though it goes by other names. The administrative state. The entrenched governing elite. Lois Lerner. The federal bureaucracy. Whatever the description, what’s pertinent to today’s Washington is that this cadre of federal employees, accountable to no one, is actively working from within to thwart Donald Trump’s agenda.

These are the promises that Trump ran and won on. Call or write to your representatives in congress if you agree that these cuts need to be made. Without those of us at the grassroots letting our voices be heard, congress won’t have the backbone to do this. Nancy

Trump Budget Seeks Big Cuts to Environment, Arts, Foreign Aid

EPA, State Department are among those to see sharp spending reductions to offset military outlay in White House plan

March 16, 2017

PresidentDonald Trumpcalled for sharp cuts to spending on foreign aid, the arts, environmental protection and public broadcasting to pay for a bigger military and a more secure border in a fiscal 2018 budget blueprint released Thursday.

The budget proposal is certain to run into stiff opposition in Congress, where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have already signaled they are unlikely to enact Mr. Trump’s deep cuts when they pass spending bills that actually fund the government.

The budget proposes hefty cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health and the State Department. It also seeks to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and other independent agencies long in the crosshairs of some conservative Republicans.

The cuts, if enacted, would mean some agencies would have to lay off federal workers, though the budget doesn’t always offer exact head counts. It does specify that cuts to the EPA “would result in approximately 3,200 fewer positions at the agency.”

“You can’t drain the swamp and leave all the people in it,” said Mick Mulvaney, the president’s budget director. “I would expect there would have to be reductions of forces at various agencies.”

The just war on the EPA

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: According to a report in The New York Times the “EPAsponsored a drive on Facebook and Twitter to promote its proposed clean water rule in conjunction with the Sierra Club. At the same time, Organizing for Action, a grass-roots group with deep ties to Mr. Obama, was also pushing the rule. They urged the public to flood theagencywith positive comments to counter opposition from farming and industry groups.”

TheEPAeven employed Thunderclap, an innovative social media tool, to help spread its message to hundreds of thousands of people, like a virtual flash mob, the Times reported.

All of this is against the law because federal agencies are prohibited from propagandizing. You see — federal agencies are supposed to be neutral in their rule-making, and let public opinion, industry, scientists and lawmakers derive the best path forward.

Scott Pruitt,Mr. Trump’s pick to lead theagency, knows this all too well. He’s sued the agency 13 times, and understands its culture of executive overreach, lawlessness and environmental activism. That’s why he’s the perfect man for the job.

The mainstream media is in panic mode.

“Hour by hour — shock decree by shock decree — a once great nation is being diminished by self-inflicted blows beyond its enemies’ wildest dreams,” Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer at The New Yorker, penned on Twitter in response to the news that the Trump administration is mandatingEnvironmental Protection Agencyscientific studies and data undergo review by political staff before public release.

EPAstaffers — who reportedly cried and had to take days off for counseling afterDonald Trumpwon the presidency in November — are in full revolt. After the Trump administration took away their social media accounts and froze their grants, a rogue staffer at the National Park Service tweeted out climate facts.

And yet, theEPAand its environmental counterparts within the federal bureaucracy need reigning in — it’s a measure that’s long overdue

Coal in Trump’s Stocking

A last-minute Obama regulation sets Donald up for a big win.

December 21, 2016

TheObamaAdministration has givenDonald Trumpan early Christmas gift, in the form of a punitive 11th-hour regulation on coal. Issued by the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM), the rule takes effect Jan. 19 as a classic example of the job-killing rules that Mr. Trump has vowed to overturn.

Though issued Monday, the Obama Administration has been working on the Stream Protection Rule for six years. Ostensibly it’s about keeping American waterways clean. In reality it’s a power grab aimed at giving federal regulators more authority to make coal too expensive for anyone to mine or use.

No one should be surprised. In 2008 candidate Barack Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that while people would still be free to build a coal-powered electricity plant under his energy policies, it would “bankrupt them” because of the costs his regulations would impose.

This is whatHillary Clintonmeant in March when she said “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of work.” It’s also what Environmental Protection Agency chiefGina McCarthymeant last month when she said that a Trump Administration would fail in its promise to revive the coal industry because her agency had helped destroy the market for coal.

Under the Stream Protection Rule, federal regulators will have expanded power to draw up new standards that make it harder to get a coal-mining permit. OSM’s federal water standards would suddenly take precedence over the state standards that have long governed the industry under the Clean Water Act. The Fish and Wildlife Service would also gain the power to veto coal permits.

The aim is to take permitting power from states and impose a one-size-fits all standard. When this process started, 10 states signed onto Interior’s rule-making process as state cooperating agencies. But eight of the 10 later withdrew because Interior wasn’t interested in what they had to say.

Dangerous Collusion

David Limbaugh

10/21/2016 12:01:00 AM – David Limbaugh

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t know how reasonable people can fail to recognize the overt collusion of the Obama administration, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party and the liberal media to shield Hillary Clinton from accountability for her many misdeeds and abundant corruption.

Perhaps I can be considered a bit of an alarmist, but if I am, so are millions of others when it comes to the dire state of this nation on a number of fronts. We have a staggering national debt, a dangerously declining military and a runaway regulatory state that is suppressing our liberties, insulating government from accountability and helping to smother economic growth. We have onerous taxes on people who are still working (notwithstanding the malicious lie that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share), an exploding welfare state, a war on the Second Amendment and the rights of private gun owners, and a government-caused health insurance catastrophe — with liberal promises of more of the same. We have unprotected borders (which threatens jobs, national sovereignty and the integrity of democratic processes), a war on Christian religious liberties by militant secularists who deny they’re doing it and a sick, amoral culture supported by the openly valueless Democratic Party, which glorifies abortion as a quasi-religious right so important it must be subsidized by the federal government. We have politicized governmental entities — e.g., the IRS, Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Communications Commission — and we are suffering ever-deteriorating race relations and a war on cops fomented and fueled by the president and his race-exploitive Democratic Party. We have proliferating Islamic terrorism accompanied by an administration that is in denial about it and sees more danger in generic extremism and conservative “bitter clingers” than it does in Islamic extremism.

Why Does the IRS Need Guns?

After grabbing legal power, bureaucrats are amassing firepower. It’s time to scale back the federal arsenal.

By

TOM COBURNand

ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI

Updated June 17, 2016 9:51 a.m. ET

Dr. Coburn is a physician and former U.S. senator from Oklahoma. He is the honorary chairman, and Mr. Andrzejewski is the founder and CEO, of OpenTheBooks.com, a repository of public-spending records.

EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: On Friday, June 17, our organization, American Transparency, is releasing its OpenTheBooks.com oversightreporton the militarization of America. The report catalogs federal purchases of guns, ammunition and military-style equipment by seemingly bureaucratic federal agencies. During a nine-year period through 2014, we found, 67 agencies unaffiliated with the Department of Defense spent $1.48 billion on guns and ammo. Of that total, $335.1 million was spent by agencies traditionally viewed as regulatory or administrative, such as the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Mint.

Some examples of spending from 2005 through 2014 raise the question: Who are they preparing to battle?

Special agents at the IRS equipped with AR-15 military-style rifles? Health and Human Services “Special Office of Inspector General Agents” being trained by the Army’s Special Forces contractors? The Department of Veterans Affairs arming 3,700 employees?

The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20 years, the number of these federal officers with arrest-and-firearm authority has nearly tripled to over 200,000 today, from 74,500 in 1996.